Robert F. Murphy received the Kelly Johnson Award at the 14th biennial Blackbird Reunion in Reno, Nev. The award honors contributions to the SR-71 Blackbird program. Murphy began working at the Lockheed Skunk Works in 1954, and was involved with the U-2, D-21, A-12, FY-12, SR-71 and F-117 programs until his retirement in 1986.
Geoff Hoon will remain defense secretary in the next U.K. Cabinet, but Lord Bach has been appointed minister of state for defense procurement. He will succeed Baroness Symons, who is now minister for trade. Adam Ingram is now minister of state for defense, succeeding John Spellar, who is now minister for transport.
Taiwan's National Space Program Office picked the Taurus ground-launched solid-fuel booster built by Orbital Sciences Corp. to launch its Rocsat-2 remote-sensing satellite. Set for launch in 2003, the satellite will carry instruments to monitor the terrestrial and marine environment on Taiwan's territory and surrounding ocean, and to study lightning discharges.
Robert L. Crippen, Joe H. Engle, Frederick H. Hauck and Richard H. Truly have been selected by the Titusville, Fla.-based Astronaut Scholarship Foundation as the first space shuttle astronauts to be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. Crippen was pilot of Columbia on its maiden flight in 1981and was director of the Kennedy Space Center in the early 1990s. Engle, now a major general in the Air National Guard, made 16 flights in the X-15 rocket plane before becoming an astronaut. He commanded the second flight of Columbia.
Meanwhile, Alcatel Space has concluded an agreement with Babakin to cooperate on sample return and networked experiments for France's Premier Mars Exploration program. French space agency CNES last week awarded Alcatel a contract to build the orbiter for a demonstration Mars sample return mission to be undertaken with NASA in 2007.
They are notorious for bickering at air shows, and this year's gathering in Paris was certainly no exception. But there was one thing on which Airbus, Boeing and the three big engine manufacturers were found to agree with startling unanimity. The airline industry, they insist, is not entering a downturn.
Willy L. Verbrugghe has become president of the PCC Flow Technologies business of the Precision Castparts Corp., Portland, Ore. He was president of the Motion Controls group of Kollmorgen. Verbrugghe succeeds David W. Norris, who has resigned.
Luck and showmanship are playing roles in the short takeoff and vertical landing portion of Joint Strike Fighter flight tests. Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin had hoped to avoid bad weather and technology gremlins to conduct fast-paced Stovl flight tests and grab bragging rights, at least, in this phase of the competition.
Jack Stockmann has become vice president-U.S. fleet and client services for Jet Aviation, West Palm Beach, Fla. He was director of operations for Wayfarer Aviation.
Regional jet manufacturing's good health was evident here last week, with most jet aircraft makers reporting positive results in terms of orders, new projects and market projections. This does not signal the death of the turboprop, however, which meets certain operators' requirements in supplying short-haul, point-to-point service. Regional aircraft activity included:
NASA's space shuttle program faces funding shortfalls in the years ahead that will require significant spending cuts, effectively dashing managers' hopes of raiding the shuttle accounts to help meet a shortfall of at least $4 billion on the International Space Station.
The unmanned Global Hawk reconnaissance aircraft may have snagged a record of a different type by claiming a foreign customer while still in test and before being operationally deployed by its first customer, the U.S. Air Force. During the Paris Air Show, Australia issued a letter of request that begins the process of procuring six Global Hawk aircraft by 2004, said Ralph Crosby, president of Northrop Grumman's integrated systems sector.
Joseph M. Gullion (see photo) has been named vice president/chief operating officer of AAR, Wood Dale, Ill. He was vice president-strategic planning and acquisitions of AAR and had been president of Boeing Airplane Services.'
France's La Poste and the Italian post office have forged an alliance to combine parcel express operations. The venture is owned 51% by the Italian carrier's express affiliate SDA and 49% by GeoPost, La Poste's express holding company. Earlier this month, La Poste inaugurated a new hub in Birmingham, England, combining operations of two private carriers acquired last year. The French carrier also purchased DPD of Germany and is interested in acquiring a stake in the Spanish and Greek postal systems.
TRW Aeronautical Systems has launched AeroVantix--an all encompassing aerospace e-business portal. The multimillion-dollar effort will provide customers with round-the-clock access to the company's supply base with online self-service key data. The site offers buy-side and sell-side transactions, engineering collaboration and supply chain management through the login www.aerovantix.com.
Michael W. Offik (see photo) has been named vice president-sales and marketing of MI Technologies of Atlanta. He held a similar position at Rockwell Automation.
British Airways is ``confident'' it can restart supersonic New York-London Concorde service later this summer using three aircraft outfitted with Kevlar-reinforced fuel tank liners and ``local strengthening of wire in the undercarriage area'' to prevent sparking. By year-end, officials say all seven aircraft should be back in service, allowing for two roundtrips per day. Modifications are complete on one Concorde, which is undergoing several weeks of ground testing related to the fuel system.
Air traffic control officials at London's Heathrow Airport are revising the criteria used for selecting on-the-job training instructors at the airport following a close call last year. The incident occurred Apr. 28, 2000, when an air traffic controller mentoring a trainee allowed an arriving British Airways Boeing 747-436 to come dangerously close to striking a British Midland Airways Airbus A321 preparing to take off on the same runway.
Roland Desjardins has been named general manager of the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Louisville (Ky.) International Airport training centers of FlightSafety Boeing Training International. He was manager of strategic training planning for American Airlines.
Orbital Technologies Corp.--a Madison, Wis., company working with seed money from NASA--has demonstrated a small rocket engine that uses a vortex inside its combustion chamber to keep the chamber walls cool (see photo). Oxygen injected at the bottom of the combustion chamber sets up a vortex. When fuel is injected at the top of the chamber and ignited, the resulting heat is deflected inward, according to President/CEO Eric Rice. The test engine used RP-1 and liquid oxygen, but Orbital Technologies also has studied hydrogen fuel.
Alain Brodin (see photo) has been appointed vice president-aeronautics of EADS. He was senior vice president-commercial of Avions de Transport Regional. Brodin has been succeeded at ATR by Paolo Revelli-Beaumont, who was senior vice president-asset management.
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTERS should look beyond silicon chips to unconventional approaches like nanotechnology to achieve the tens of petaflops that NASA will need in the future, Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said at SGI's high-performance computing weather-forecasting summit. He called for spending $100 million to advance analysis techniques before the researchers' observations and computer simulations turn into ``data morgues.'' Last year, NASA collected 330 terabytes of data, which is more than all of the data collected over the previous 40 years.
Robert P. Iorizzo has become president of the Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Baltimore-based Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector. He succeeds James G. Roche, who has been confirmed as U.S. Air Force secretary. Iorizzo was vice president/general manager of the sector's Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Naval Systems Div.
The future of NASA's X-37 orbit-and-reentry testbed probably won't be settled until this fall, largely because the Air Force will need that much time to decide what role it wants in the program. By then the service also will have a better idea of whether it wants to take over the X-33 reusable launch vehicle (RLV) prototype, from which NASA has bailed out. Dennis E.
